St. Patrick's Day: How to Pour the Perfect Pint of Guinness

As St. Patrick's Day approaches, a "Guinness Beer Specialist" explains the proper technique behind the Guinness pour, and discusses the brewery's history—and future.

This St. Patrick's Day, when you've found a warm corner of a dark pub, and it's time for that obligatory Guinness, pay attention to what the bartender is doing. If you get your pint in the time it takes to pour a lager or an IPA, something is wrong. The perfect pint of Guinness is "all about patience," says Domhnall Marnell, a "Guinness Beer Specialist" based at the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin. And watching the two-minute process—what Marnell describes as the "pageantry of the two-part pour"—is part of the overall experience. Marnell has the pour down to a precise science: the 15 millimeter head, the 90-second settling period, the fact that a pour from start to finish should take exactly 119.5 seconds.

On Monday, Marnell traveled to New York to give us a tutorial on the perfect pour at Swift Hibernian Lounge (home, according to the bar's manager, to one of the top five pints of Guinness in the city—we've tasted no evidence to the contrary). There, Marnell took us through the six-step process, from the nitrogen hissing out of the tap to the most important, and oft ignored, part of the pint: the head, which locks in the flavor and aroma. To drink the beer properly, you look straight ahead, not down at your glass, to block the foamy, bitter top and take in the dark beer underneath. Watch it all in the video below.

How to Pour the Perfect Pint of Guinness

As long as the pour is executed correctly, Guinness should taste the same no matter where you are. Marnell makes a point to "debunk the myth" that Guinness tastes better in Ireland. "Whether you are drinking a Guinness in Ireland, anywhere in Europe or North America, every single keg is brewed and exported from St. James’s Gate, so we are all drinking the exact same beer," he says. While that emphasis on quality has been a source of pride since 1759, when Arthur Guinness took out a 9,000-year lease on St. James's Gate, where the beer is brewed, the creamy texture we associate so strongly with Guinness is a fairly recent phenomenon. Marnell tells Traveler that this characteristic, caused by mixing nitrogen with the beer, was only developed in 1959, thanks to an enterprising brewer named Michael Ash, who was looking for a way to mark the 200th anniversary of the lease.

When it comes to St. Patrick's Day, Marnell doesn't shy away from stereotypes—he embraces and is even humbled by them. "There are only a few million people living in Ireland," Marnell points out, "yet we estimate that about 70 million people worldwide will celebrate St. Patrick’s Day and that about 13 million pints of Guinness will be raised in celebration." To Marnell, both St. Patrick's Day and Guinness are celebrations of what Ireland means to him—"being socially friendly and enjoying oneself."

And if he wasn't in New York for the holiday? Why, he'd be at work, of course, where the Guinness Storehouse expects 33,000 visitors to the brewery over a five-day festival that will include parades, tastings, and a marching band arranged throughout the giant, pint-shaped space, hollowed out of the middle of the seven-story building. "It's our Super Bowl," Marnell says. "There's nothing quite like it."

The nitrogenated draught beer that Guinness is known for around the globe is only one of many brews the company currently offers. A Nitro IPA and an American Blonde Lager are two recent additions to the Guinness roster, as well as a slew of revived recipes from centuries past, like the West Indies Porter, first brewed in 1801. Could another recipe ever overtake the black gold of Guinness Draught ? We may be surprised by what the Dublin institution has to offer in coming years. "We have 8,743 years left to go on our lease," Marnell says, "and we’ve got a lot more beer to make."